Monday, March 19, 2012

My Breakdown of the MOP Changes (as they interest me)

- It looks like they are going to be focusing more on the original wonder of Vanilla WoW. Exploration and Horde versus Alliance.

- They are adding in seven zones instead of 5. This means that you will not have to take the same path for each of your characters. This is certainly an upgrade over the cataclysm model.

- Cloud Serpent Mount: The Cloud serpent mount seems like an interesting dynamic. You pick a color of egg to gain a pet that follows you around. After doing X ammount of dailies, you will get a mount. Then you need to do more quests to train it (whatever that entails).

- Tillers: Farmville faction of WoW. You do dailies to help them plant shit and clear out weeds. I can do that at home....but at least its in WoW. Lol.

- Many new races to interact with. There seem to be fish men, lizard men, and monkey men. Obviously people will want to play them sometime down the line.

- PVP: It looks like there are going to be two new battlegrounds and a new arena. I am sure I will check them out, but they will not be a primary point of interest for me.

- Monk: Ok, so it looks like there are some attacks that build energy. Then you use that energy to use attacks the make Chi. Then you use that Chi to use bigger attacks.....C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER.

- Raids and Heroics: There are going to be 9 different Heroics and three raids. There will be three raid difficulties just like out current system with our current raid.

-Scenarios: This sounds like a short group activity that will be in adition to instances. You can run a quick scenario with a group of anything (no tank or healer needed). I think it will be mostly random.

Pet Battles: First of all, the pet UI will show you all the pets you do have as well as the ones you dont. If you dont have it, it will tell you where you can get it. You can name your pets, they get abilities and level....and you have all of your pets on all of your characters. There will be roughly 100 random pets around azeroth to collect....my wife will be very very busy. You will be able to keep track of wins, but not losses. I think that will be good because the people who play a lot will not want to see 10 wins versus 60 losses. It is a lot more discouraging.

Challenge Modes: You do challenges in dungeons to earn prestige. You get bronze, silver and gold medals for completing the challenges in specific amount of time.

Get all of the bronze ones to gain a title and achievement.

Get all silver medals to gain some sweet class based transmog gear that may also affect your animations.

Get all of the Gold Medals to get a prestigious mount.

There will be a leaderboard to compare versus your friends and others on the realm.

11th Character Slot: Obviously this is not as good as making it so that there is not realm limit, only an account limit, but I needed at least this. My character slots are full, and I did not want to have to erase any.

Account Wide Achievements: This is not confirmed yet, but it is something that they will be working on.

AOE FUCKING LOOTING: YES!!! I was just talking about this last night. This is one of the things that SWTOR did very right. This will make dungeons so much better. It will also make running someone thru a dungeon much better. Or just farming.

Scaling Down Level/Power: They may put this function in so that you can play at the same level as your lower level friends if you choose. I believe this will be optional.

LFR Loot System: Everyone rolls on the items from a boss individually.
If you win the roll by being one of the highest few rollers, the system checks the boss’s loot table and if there is an item for you, you win it. If not, you win some gold.
This way other people cannot impact what you win, only the roll you get can.
You aren’t always guaranteed something. If the boss doesn’t have an item you can use then you won’t win anything.

This can be AMAZING. Especially if they throw it into the dungeon features. This will make gearing better as you can basically just roll for gear instead of hoping that the gear you want drops.

So far, I must say that I am PUMPED!!!

This expansion is going to be awesome. I love casual WOW and I am getting tons of it.

Area looting while not new to MMO's, wouldn't have gotten the attention it got if it weren't for The Old Republic. Thanks to the huge draw it got. I certainly didn't come out of my month of Rift thinking, hey, wish World of Warcraft had area loot like Rift. Haven't really given it a second thought at all really.